She looked about her vaguely.
‘I don’t see how they would help us,’ she told him. ‘Besides, I don’t see any. No, darling, the only thing to do is to smile and be brave. After all, we have each other.’
‘Darling, forgive me,’ he said.
Hand in hand, they wandered along the road.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast . . .
They walked for hours, but in the wrong direction. They found themselves in Tring. They had lunch and walked again; they found themselves in Watford.
They caught buses, they caught trains; they found themselves in London.
It was nine in the evening once more. The day had passed slowly, horribly, yet with a subtle swiftness.
As children lost in a wood, they wandered up and down the Euston Road. Shabby, rain-bespattered and unwashed, they looked like the remnant of a hunger strike march.
Suddenly her shoe button burst. Stifling a groan, she bent her weary back to fix the strap.
As she did so, her wedding ring slipped off her finger and rolled into a drain . . .
They stood on the doorstep of a lodging-house.
‘My wife and I want a room for the night,’ he said. ‘We camped out yesterday, and then our car was stolen, and so was our luggage.’
The woman glanced at the girl’s left hand.
‘My wife lost her ring, too,’ he added.
The woman sniffed and shrugged her shoulders.
‘You seem to have lost a good many things.’
‘We are telling the truth,’ he said coldly.
‘I don’t believe a word of your story,’ answered the woman, ‘but I won’t turn you out this time of night.’
Meekly they followed her upstairs.
‘The lady can have this room, and the gentleman the one at the end of the passage. This is a respectable house, and I’m a respectable woman.’
She frowned down at them, her arms akimbo.
‘And I’m a very light sleeper.’
There seemed no more to be said.
She turned and left them in the passage.
‘Good heavens! Have I got to creep like a thief to my own wife?’ he whispered fiercely.
‘Hush! she may hear,’ she whispered back.
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you go to your room and wait for me. I’ll pretend to go to mine, and then I’ll come along to yours.’
‘Supposing the boards creak?’
‘I’ll risk it. Darling, I love you.’
‘So do I.’
He began to undress in his own room. The lodgings might be uncomfortable, but they were better than a gorse bush.
What an appalling day it had been! But she had behaved marvellously. Any other girl would have gone home to her family.
To think he had waited for her seven years . . .
He opened the window, and as he did so the door of his own room slammed.
There was a noise of something falling on to the floor. He turned, and saw that the handle of the door had slipped off into the passage outside, while the useless knob lay at his feet . . .
The next morning he bought her a wedding ring at Woolworth’s.
They moved to lodgings where the landlady was deaf, and where the door of the room bolted and double-locked.
It seemed to them that the world was theirs. The only trouble was that they had no money.
He left her alone while he looked for a job, and as soon as his back was turned she crept away to an agency. They must both work if they wished to live in comfort together.
How wonderful their life would be – the quiet suppers, the long evenings . . .
And, later, children playing about the floor.
They met at half-past six, he with his jaw set, a feverish glint in his eye.
‘Darling, I’ve got a job,’ he said.
‘How splendid!’
‘It’s all I could get, but it’s better than nothing. Anyway, we’ll have to-morrow in the day-time, all to-morrow.’
‘Oh! no,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got a job, too. I’m a daily companion to a lady in Golders Green. My hours are from nine until seven.’
He stared at her as one who has heard sentence of death.
‘You don’t mean what you’re saying!’
‘Why! Whatever’s the matter?’
‘My hours are just the reverse. From seven until nine.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Darling, I’m a night porter at a bank in Acton.’
Piccadilly
She sat on the edge of a chair swinging her legs. Her frock of black satin was too tight for her, and too short; as she tilted on her chair the dress rose above her knees, and I could see the beginning of a ladder in her stocking, hastily mended, the thread jumbled in a knot. Her hair was unnaturally light and over-waved; the vivid red of her lipstick, smudged and thick, toned badly against the pallor of her face dusted with a mauve powder. Her patent shoes were thin for walking, and cheap. The toes were too stumpy and the heels too high. She had thrown off her black coat, the collar and the cuffs of which boasted an imitation fur, and her hat, a minute piece of velvet worn at the back of her head, now lay at her feet. Around her throat was a necklace of scarlet beads that clashed with her mouth. Her face was thin, the skin drawn tightly across her cheekbones, and her eyes – silly doll’s eyes, like blue china – stared sullenly in front of her.
Every now and then she puffed at a cigarette, pursing up her lips as a child would do, vainly attempting smoke rings, playing at bravado. She had sprinkled herself freely with scent, but even so it could not altogether hide the smell peculiar to one whose skin is rarely washed, whose clothes are seldom cleaned, whose body is under-nourished. She looked at me under her lashes, and then shrugged her shoulders, throwing aside her cigarette, forcing a smile that went ill with her appearance, that belonged to someone who must have been dead a long while. Then she began to talk at last, her voice hard and metallic, real-ising that I was not a man but a dummy thing without feeling, a note-book in my hand. ‘Newspaper boy, that’s it, is it?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to earn your living the same as I have. It’s a dirty job, isn’t it? When some fellow has left his wife for a new girl your boss sends you round to nose out where it was done and who with. Or else a kid is run over by a tram, and you call on the mother to hear how much blood he spilt. I guess you’re popular all right in homes where things have gone wrong. I guess it gives you a sort of pleasure, doesn’t it, to poke your fingers into people’s lives? You’d think there was trouble enough without a boy like you trampling with heavy feet on something that ought to be kept dark and secret.
‘What’s it all for, can you tell me? So that Mr Smith can get a thrill to himself thinking, “I might have been that chap – unfaithful,” so that Mrs Smith can wonder, “Might have happened to my kid?” No – I’m not clever, I’m not wise. But I kind of get time for thinking things now and again. Well, what do you want me to tell you? I’ve no secrets, not these days. I don’t know anyone that’s been murdered, nor run over, nor left sudden, nor waiting for a baby. I haven’t any friends to speak of. I rub along better on my own. You know – I find the talk of other people silly. Seems as though whatever they say it wouldn’t make a pennyworth of change if they’d left it all unsaid. The weather now – ah! that’s different if you like. Weather means a lot to me. You understand that, don’t you? I hate the rain – I can’t afford to have it rain. And I hate the fog – I hate the winter – they’re bad times for me. But for Lady Stuck-up in her fur coat and her car, it doesn’t hurt her. She’s all right. And Miss Prim selling stockings behind a counter, she’s all right. Half the world don’t worry when it rains.
‘But me, looking out of this window and seeing the sky like a dripping bucket, and saying to myself, “Will it stop before night?” and “Will my shoes let in the wet again?” Yes, and the chap who sells sunshades – we worry. Come on, tell me it takes all sorts to make a world. They told me that in school. I don’t know why you
want to ask me questions. Is it that you’re doing a piece in your paper called “Confessions of the Great”? I’ve seen that sort of stuff before. “How I became an Actress”, by Florrie Flapdoodle, or “My First Step Towards the Church”, by the Archbishop of Bunk. You want to pry into the lives of humble people like myself. “As a Kid I loved handling Corpses,” said the Undertaker. Is that it? So you want me to give it you, hot and strong, straight from the shoulder.
‘Listen, you funny little fellow with your notebook and your inky fingers. I’ll tell you a story. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. You can make what you like out of it and print it in big letters in the “Sunday Muck”: “What Led to My Entering the Profession”, by Mazie.’
You see, in a kind of way, everything happened because of superstition. I’ve always been mad for superstition. Walking under ladders, crossing my salt, bowing to the moon, hunting up passages in the Bible. Even now it’s the same. Every morning I open my Bible to see if it’s going to be my lucky day. Laughing at me? I tell you I’m serious. A girl I knew found ‘God shall send a pestilence unto ye,’ and in a fortnight she had it. She didn’t laugh. All she knew was that it didn’t come from God . . . We’re like that, every one of us. Believing in legends, believing in symbols, believing in signs – the only things we don’t believe in are fairies.
Listen – if I wasn’t superstitious I’d be a housemaid now in Park Lane. It’s a fact. I’d be wearing a cap and an apron. I’d be emptying the slops of some overfed old countess. I’d be meeting my boy Thursday night under a lamp-post and going to a picture house for one-and-three-penny-worth of cuddle. And, look at me – I’m free, I don’t owe anything to no one, I belong to myself. Haven’t I got a room of my own? Once I was a kid that didn’t know a thing. I went into service straight from the Soldiers’ Orphan Home. A kitchenmaid in Kensington, that was me. No, I hadn’t got any relations. Never knew my parents. The fellow who met my mother on a foggy night must have worn a uniform, else I wouldn’t have been sent to the Soldiers’ Orphan Home. I was happy because I was ignorant. I used to scrub myself every day with soap and wear flannel next the skin. I didn’t know any better. I thought if I rose from under-housemaid to upper maybe I’d save enough at fifty to live quiet in the country.
I wanted to marry, too. I thought if you kissed a boy he took you straight away to church. Then I met Jim. Jim didn’t take me to church nor did he kiss me much, but he taught me a whole lot of things housemaids don’t need to know. I felt for Jim what girls in books feel for the fellow on the cover. You know, he has big eyes and curly hair. Jim’s hair was straight and he had a cast in one eye, but I didn’t worry. I don’t know if there’s a name for it – what Jim and I had. In the pictures they call it Love. In the newspapers they call it an Offence. I didn’t call it nothing, but it seemed all right to me. I had a pain in my heart when he wasn’t there. I’d wait around in the rain; I wouldn’t work proper. I thought maybe he’d leave me if I didn’t look nice. So I gave up washing and bought some scent and powder, and he said I was fine. He used to say to me, ‘Look here, Mazie, service isn’t any good to you. You’re too smart.’ ‘Why,’ I’d tell him, ‘I can’t do anything else.’ ‘Of course you can,’ he’d say, ‘there’s heaps of things you could do. Service is drab. It doesn’t lead you nowhere.’ When I told him maybe one day I’d get to upper housemaid he laughed.
‘Are you going to waste your days planning what’ll come to you when you’re fifty?’ he said. ‘I thought you’d got more sense.’
I told him he was mean, but I thought about it all the same. I thought maybe he’d look down on me if I stayed in service. ‘If I leave my place you’ll have to find me a job,’ I said. He looked queer then, he didn’t say much, but next time we went together he petted me so I felt I’d do anything he wanted as long as I didn’t have to lose him. ‘I treat you all right, don’t I?’ he said. ‘How do you think I earn money to take you out and give you good times?’
‘I don’t know. You work, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I work, Mazie, but not the way you mean.’
‘Well, tell me,’ I said.
Then he laughed, slyly, winking at me. ‘Look at this,’ he said, and he took a necklace out of his pocket and jingled it up and down before my eyes.
‘Where’d you find that?’ I asked him.
‘Took it off an old lady,’ he said.
Then I understood. Jim was a thief. I was scared. I cried, I said I wouldn’t have any more to do with him. I was honest, I said. ‘All right,’ he laughed, and went off, not coming near me for three weeks.
That taught me. I saw I couldn’t do without him. I wrote him he could steal the Crown Jewels if he liked, as long as he took me back. I thought p’raps I could reform him and one day I’d save enough money to keep him and buy a little house in the country. I gave in my notice to the lady in Kensington. I saw an advertisement in a paper for an under-housemaid in a place in Park Lane.
I showed it to Jim. ‘That’s me,’ I said. He laughed. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said. ‘You come and get rich my way.’
I put the advertisement in my bag.
‘I’m going to answer it today,’ I told him.
‘We’ll see,’ he said.
He said he’d come with me. We went to the Underground and booked to Down Street. I was fussed and worried, I wondered if I was doing the right thing – answering that advertisement.
‘Look here,’ said Jim, ‘let’s make a bargain. Either you go to Park Lane or you come and live with me, work with me. You can’t do both; quick now, decide.’ He said this as we got into the train. I shut my eyes tight. I thought, ‘If only there could be a sign to tell me what to do.’ Then I opened my eyes, I glanced at the platform as the train carried us away. Suddenly I saw the words flash up at me in lights on a board: ‘Passing Down Street.’
Then I said aloud to Jim, ‘All right. I’ll come to you.’
Yes, you can call it superstition. Each thing has happened to me in that way. In the Underground, too. Funny, isn’t it? Never up in the air, never up in the world. Always below, beneath the ground. I was with Jim for about six months. He trained me so I could steal women’s handbags without their noticing. It was quite easy. I was expert after a time.
We worked the Underground. I got to know every station, every lift – all the network of passages. Sometimes it was exciting, and dangerous, making me want to laugh, but more often it was hell. Sometimes I’d tremble so I’d come over faint. ‘Pull yourself together,’ Jim would whisper, ‘do you want to give us away?’
Sometimes he’d make me go alone. Then I’d be scared. It seemed as though everyone must be looking, and that I was there, all alone, no one near, nowhere to hide if things went wrong.
‘You’re not bold enough,’ Jim told me, ‘how d’you think we’re ever going to get rich if you act timid the way you do? Handbags don’t bring us in much unless you get a lucky haul. You’ve got to learn an’ be more snappy. Most women nowadays wear bracelets. Why can’t you have a try at them?’ He’d always be worrying at me.
‘Can’t you lift a bracelet?’ he’d say. He’d complain all the time. He was lazy now, he made me do the work.
One evening when I’d only lifted one bag the whole day he turned nasty. ‘I’m coming out with you tonight,’ he said, ‘and we’re going to get a bracelet.’ I began to cry. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel sure of my fingers.’
‘You’ll do as I tell you or I’m finished with you,’ he said.
We started to work the Central London line shortly after eleven. We counted on getting the after-theatre crowd. It was at Oxford Circus he saw the old lady in the fur coat walk to the booking office. She booked to Lancaster Gate. Jim nudged me, pointed to her hands.
She wore a large ring on her little finger. It looked valuable, too. We also booked to Lancaster Gate. I was trembling all over, and my hands were slippery with sweat. ‘I can’t do it,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t do it.’ He held my arm so tight I near
ly screamed. We didn’t sit next to her in the carriage. We were in another part of the train.
When we got out at Lancaster Gate she was walking up the platform. There were few people about, I saw it was going to be difficult. There wouldn’t be the excuse of jostling in a crowd.
She was in evening dress. It was long at the back. She couldn’t manage it proper. I thought that perhaps if she tripped in some way . . . I brushed against her – she dropped her bag. We both groped for it on the floor. The bag opened and her powder-box and purse and odds and ends fell out in a mess. I talked loudly, fussing her, pretending to help, bumping her against the wall – but I had the ring. Then I left her, and ran on to catch the lift, Jim just behind me. ‘Something is going to happen,’ I thought, ‘something is going to happen . . .’ I felt I could see prison in front of me, and I couldn’t escape. If the old lady missed her ring in the lift I was done for. I wondered if I had better turn back and get through to the other platform. I knew if I went up in that lift I was finished. And as though to prove it – as though there really was something true in superstition – I saw the notice: ‘Stand clear of the Gates.’
I turned to Jim. ‘I’m going back,’ I said. He was rough, he shook my arm. ‘Get in quick – you little fool,’ he said. But he was scared, too. I could see the whites of his eyes. He pushed me inside the lift. I saw the old lady running along the passage waving her hand. ‘I’ve been robbed,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve been robbed. Stop that girl.’
People turned to look at me. I tried to get to the other side of the lift, but it was barred. Then they began to crowd round me and to question me.
You don’t want me to tell you about gaol, do you? You can squeeze that out of somebody else. There’s plenty of ex-convicts who like to get into the newspapers. I’ve got nothing to say . . . Oh! Yes – they treated me kind. That’s right, isn’t it?
And a lady visited me once a week and asked me if I’d been a bad girl, and wouldn’t I be happier with Jesus? I told her ‘No,’ I didn’t care how dirty he’d been to me I’d go with Jim and no one else. That was true, too. Maybe he’d turned me down, but I was his girl. I only wanted to get clear of gaol to be with him again. He told me it was the same for him. He came and saw me once. You stand in a kind of place with bars around, and they let you talk to your friends. ‘Why, Mazie,’ he said. ‘You know I didn’t mean to get you in here, don’t you?’
The Doll Page 7
